Marshland Elegy ‘A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imper- ceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalames of tamarack, sliding across bog. meadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon, Out of some far recess of the sky a tinkling of litle bells falls soft upon the listening land. Then again silence, Now comes a baying of some sweet-throated hound, soon the clamor of a responding pack. Then a far clear blast of hunt ing hors, out of the sky into the fog, High hors, low homs, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, craks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its neamess, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approtch of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mist, sweep a final are of sky, and setle in langorous descending spirals to theic feeding grounds, A ew day has begun on the erane marsh, 195)seTces WERE AND THERE, ‘A.sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place. Yearly since the ice age it has awakened each spring to the clangor ‘of cranes. The peat layers that comprise the bog are laid down in the basin of an ancient lake. The eranes stand, as it were, upon the sodden pages of their own history. These [peats are the compressed remains ofthe mosses that clogged the pools, of the tamaracks that spread over the moss, of the cranes that bugled over the tamaracks since the retreat of the foe sheet. An endless caravan of generations has built of its own bones this bridge into the future, this habitat ‘where the oncoming host again may live and breed and die. ‘To what end? Out on the bog a crane, gulping some uckless frog, springs his unguinly hulk into the aie and flails the morning sun with mighty wings. The tamaracks re-echo with his bugled certitude, He seems to know. Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art swith the pretty. Te expands through successive stages of the Deautful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The qual- ity of ranes lies, I think, inthis higher garmut, as yet beyond the reach of words. “This much, though, can be said: our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history. His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call we ‘hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of ‘evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that {incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and condi- tons the daily affairs of birds and men. ‘And so they live and have their being—these cranes—not 196] {in the constricted present, but in the wider reaches of eval tionary time, Their annual return is the ticking of the geologic clock. Upon the place of their return they confer @ cult ditncton, mid the endless mediocrity of the ‘commonplace, a crane marsh holds a paleontological patent tnt, won ate much ef aa and rove oly bby shotgun. The sadness discernible in some marshes arises, ppethaps, from their once having harbored eranes. Now they stand humbled, adrift in history. Some sense of this quality in cranes scems to have been felt by sportsmen and omithotogists of all ages. Upon such quay at this the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick loosed is gyrfaloons. Upon such quarry as this once swooped the bt tai Meo Pa tel wr Te rvs the highest amusement from sporting with gyrfaleons ant hs At Chango te Khan ea git Peso by a fine plain where are found cranes in great numbers. He ccauses millet and other grains to be sown in order that the birds may not want.” ‘The omithologist Bengt Berg, seeing cranes as a boy ‘upon the Swedish heaths, forthwith msde them his life ‘work, He followed them to Africa and discovered their win- ter retreat on the White Nile. He says of his first encounter: “Tewas a spectacle which eclipsed the fight of the roe in the ‘Thousand and One Nights, When the glacier came down out of the north, crunching hills and gouging valleys, some adventuring rampart of the ice climbed the Baraboo Hills and fell back into the outlet ‘gorge of the Wisconsin River. The swollen waters backed up and formed a lake hlf as long as the state, bordered on L971sceTcaes ENE AND TENE the cast by cliffs of ice, and fed by the torrents that fell from melting mountains. The shorelines of ths old lake are stil visible; its bottom is the bottom of the great marsh. “The lake rose through the centuries, finally spilling over ‘east of the Baraboo range. There it cut a new channel for the river, and thus drained itself. To the residual lagoons ‘came the cranes, bugling the defeat of the retreating win- ter, summoning the on-creeping host of living things to thelr collective task of marsh-building, Floating bogs of sphagoum moss clogged the lowered waters, filled them. Sedge and leatherleaf, tamarack and spruce successively advanced over the bog, anchoring it by their root fabric, sucking out its water, making peat. The lagoons disappeared, Dut not the cranes. To the moss-meadows that replaced the ancient waterways they returned each spring to dance and Dugle and rear their gangling sorrel-colored young. These, albeit birds, are not properly called chicks, but colts. T ean- not explain why. On some dewy June morning watch them agembol over their ancestral pastures at the heels ofthe roan ‘mare, and you will see for yourself, ‘One year not long ago a French trapper in buckskins pushed his canoe up one of the moss-clogged crecks that ‘tread the great marsh. At this attempt to invade thelr miry stronghold the cranes gave vent to loud and ribald laughter. ‘A century or two later Englishmen came in covered wagons, ‘They chopped clearings in the timbered moraines that bor- er the marsh, and in them planted com and buckwheat, ‘They did not intend, like the Great Khan at Changanor, to feed the cranes. But the cranes do not question the intent of glaciers, emperors, or pioneers. They ate the grain, and ‘when some irate farmer failed to concede their usufruct in [981 his com, they trumpeted a warning and sailed across rarsh to another fam, eee ‘There was n0 alfalfa in those days, and the hill-farms rade poor hay land, especially in dry years. One dry year someone set a fre in the tamaracks. The burn grew up Guickly to luejoint grass, which, when cleared of dead ‘trees, made a dependable bay meadow. After that, each August, men appeared to cut hay. In winter, after the cranes had gone South, they drove wagons over the frozen Dogs and hauled the hay to thelr farms in the hills. Yearly they plied the marsh with fire and axe, and in two short decades hay meadows dotted the whole expanse. Each August when the haymakers came to pitch their ‘camps, singing and drinking and lashing their teams with whip and tongue, the cranes whinnied to their colts and retreated to the far fastnesses. ‘Red shitepokes’ the hay- rakers called them, from the rusty hue which at thet season ‘often stains the battleship-gray of erane plumage. After the hay was stacked and the marsh again their own, the cranes retumed, to call down out of October skies the migrant flocks from Canada. Together they wheeled over the new- cut stubbles and raided the com until frost for the winter exodus. aes ‘These haymeadow days were the Areadian age for marsh Awellers. Man and beast, plat and sil lived on and with cach other in mutual toleration, to the mutual benefit of all. ‘The marsh might have kept on producing hay and pratrie chickens, deer and muskrat, crane-music and cranberries forever. ‘The new overlords did not understand this. They did not include sol, plants, or birds in their ideas of mutuality. The dividends of such a balanced economy were too modest. 09}(serves HERE AND THERE epidemic of dit ‘marsh was gridironed with di new fields and farmsteads ‘But erops were poor and beset by frosts, to which the expensive ditches added an aftermath of debt. Farmers ‘moved out. Peat beds dried, shrank, caught fire. Sun-energy ‘out of the Pleistocene shrouded the countryside in acrid smoke. No man raised his voice against the waste, only his nose against the smell. After a dry summer not even the win- ter snows could extinguish the smoldering marsh, Great jpockmarks were bumed into field and meadow, the scars reaching down to the sands of tho old lake, peat-covered. these Inundred centuries. Rank weeds sprang out of the ashes, to be followed after a year or two by aspen scrub. The cranes were hard put, their numbers shrinking the remnants of unbumed meadow. For them, the song of the power shovel came near being an elegy. The high priests of progress knew nothing of cranes, and cared less. What is fa species more or less among engineers? What good is an ‘undrained marsh anyhow? ‘For a decade or two crops grew poorer, fires deeper, ‘wood-felds larger, and eranes scarcer, year by year. Only reflooding, it appeared, could keep the peat from burning, Meanwhile cranberry growers had, by plogging drainage ches, reflooded a few spots and obtained good yields. Distant politicians bugled about marginal Tand, over-pro- Auction, unemployment relief, conservation. Economists and planners came to look at the marsh. Surveyors, technicians, CCCs, buzzed about. A counter-epidemic of reflooding set in. Government bought land, resettled farmers, plugged ditches wholesale, Slowly the bogs are re-wetting. The fire- 1100 pocks become ponds. Gias fies still bur longer bum the wetted so : AL this, once the CCC eas imps were gone, was good for ee et me Snexorably over the old bums, and stil ess the maze of new roads that inevitably follow governmental conservation, To build a road is so much simpler than to think of whet the country really needs. A roadlest marsh is seemingly as worthless tothe alphabetical conservationist as an undralnod one was tothe empirebulen, Soe, the one natural resource still mdowered of alphabes, is 50 far recognt 8 Valuable only by omithologss anders, Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes 4s wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate, But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wildemes let to cherish, but they can no Some day, perhaps in the very process of our benefactions, perhaps in the fullness of geologic time, the last erane will trumpet his farewell and spiral skyward from the great ‘marsh, High out of the clouds will fall the sound of hunt. ing homs, the baying of the phantom pack, the tinkle of Tittle bell and then a silence never tobe broken uals per chance in some far pasture of the Milky Way. ‘The Sand Counties Every profession keeps a small herd of epit of epithets, and needs @ pasture where they may run at large, Thus economists (011Michigan, or Labrador, or Tennessee. His love was for present things, and these things were present somewhere; to find them required only the free sky, and the will to ply his wings. ‘To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown ‘to most people and to all pigeons. To see America as history, te concee of destiny as becoming, 0 smal hickory trce through the stil lapse of ages—all these things are pos- sible for us, and to achieve them takes only the free sky, and the will to ply our wings. In these things, and not in Mr, Bush's bombs and Mr. DuPont's nylons, lies objective evi- dence of our superiority over the beasts. Flambeau People who have never eanoed a wild river, or who have done so only with a guide in the stern, are apt to assume that novelty, plos healthful exercise, account for the value of the trip. T thought so too, until T met the two college boys on the Flambeau, Supper dishes washed, we sat on the bank watching a buck dunking for water plants on the far shore. Soon the Duck raised his head, cocked his ears upstream, and then bounded for cover. ‘Around the bend now came the cause of his alarm: two boys in a canoe. Spying us, they edged in to pass the time of day. “What time is it?” was their first question. They explained that their watches had run down, and for the frst time in their lives there was no clock, whistle, or radio to set watches by. For two days they had lived by ‘sun-time,’ and were ca] getting a thrill ot of it. No servant brought them meals: they got their meat out of the river, or went without. No trafic cop whistled them off the hidden rock in the next rapids. No friendly roof kept them dry when they mis- ‘guessed whether or not to pitch the tent. No guide showed them which camping spots offered a nightlong breeze, and which a nightlong misery of mosquitoes; which firewood ‘made clean coals, and which only smoke. Before our young adventurers pushed off downstream, ‘we Teamed that both were slated for the Army upon the conclusion of their trip. Now the motif was clear. This trip ‘was their first and last taste of freedom, an interlude be- tween two regimentations: the campus and the barracks. ‘The elemental simplicities of wildemess travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they repre- sented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness ‘gave them their fist taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. ‘These boys were ‘on their own’ in this particular sense, Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to lear the meaning of this particular freedom. ‘When I was a small boy, my father used to describe all choice camps, fishing waters, and woods as ‘nearly as good as the Flambeau.” When I finally launched my own canoe in this legendary stream, I found it up to expectations as a river, but as a wilderness it was on its last legs. New cot tages, resorts, and highway bridges were chopping up the wild stretches into shorter and shorter segments. To run down the Flambeau was to be mentally whipsawed between, altemating impressions: no sooner had you built up the ‘mental ilusion of being in the wilds than you sighted a boat= Ls]landing, and soon you were coasting past some cottager’s Safely past the peonies, a buck bounding up the bank helped us to restore the wildemess flavor, and the next rapids Gnished the job. But staring at you beside the pool below was a synthetic log cabin, complete with composition roof, ‘Bide-A-Wee! signboard, and rustic pergola for afternoon bridge. ‘Paul Bunyan was too busy a man to think about posterity, but if ho bad asked to reserve a spot for posterity to see ‘what the old north woods looked like, he likely would have chosen the Flambeau, for here the cream of the white pine ‘on the same actes with the cream of the sugar maple, Yellow birch, and hemlock. This rich intermixture of pine and hardwoods was and is uncommon. The Flambeau pines, ‘growing on a hardwood soil richer than pines are ordinar~ ily able to occupy, were so large and valuable, and so close to.a good log-driving stream, that they were cut at an easly day, as evidenced by the decayed condition of their giant ‘stumps. Only defective pines were spared, but there are enough of these alive today to punctuate the skyline of the Flambeau with many a green monument to bygone days. ‘The hardwood logging eame much later; in fact, the last big hardwood company ‘pulled stel’ on its last logging rail road only a decade ago. All that remains of that company today is a ‘andeoffice’ in its ghost town, selling of its cut- overs to hopeful settles. Thus died an epoch in American history: the epoch of cut out and got out. ‘Like a coyote rummaging in the offal of a deserted camp, the postlogging economy of the Flambeau subsists on the Teavings of its own past. ‘Gypo’ pulpwood cutters nose ‘round in the slashings for the occasional small hemlock uM) overlooked in the main logging. A portable sawmill crew dredges the riverbed for sunken ‘deadheads, many of which drowned during the hell-for-leather log-drives of the glory days. Rows of these mud/-stained corpses are drawn up on shore at the old landings—all in perfect condition, and some ‘of great value, for no such pine exists in the north woods today. Post and pole cutters strip the swamps of white cedar; the deer follow them around and strip the felled tops of their foliage. Everybody and everything subsists on leav ings. ‘So complete are all these scavengings that when the modem cottager builds a log cabin, he uses imitation logs sawed out of slab piles in Idaho or Oregon, and hauled to Wisconsin woods in a freight ear. The proverbial coals to Newcastle seem a mild irony compared with this. Yet there remains the river, in a few spots hardly changed since Peul Bunyan’s day; at early dawn, before the motor boats awaken, one can still hear it singing in the wildemess. There are a few sections of uncut timber, luckily state- ‘owned. And there is a considerable remnant of wildlife: ‘uskellunge, bass, and sturgeon in the river; mergansers, black ducks, and wood ducks breeding in the sloughs; os- preys, eagles, and ravens cruising overhead. Everywhere are deer, perhaps too many: T counted 52 in two days afloat. A wolf or two still roams the upper Flambeau, and there is a ‘rapper who claims he saw a marten, though no marten skin hhas come out of the Flambeau since 1900. Using these remnants of the wildemess as a nucleus, the State Conservation Department began, in 1943, to rebuild a Afty-mile stretch of river as a wild area for the use and enjoy- ment of young Wisconsin. This wild stretch is set in a matrix of state forest, but there is to be no forestry on the (striver banks, and as few road crossings as possible. Slowly, patiently, and sometimes expensively the Conservation De- partment has been buying land, removing cottages, ward- ing off unnecessary roads, and in general pushing the clock back, as far as possible, toward the original wilderness. ‘The good soil that enabled the Flambeau to grow the bbest cork pine for Paul Bunyan likewise enabled Rusk ‘County, during recent decades, to sprout dairy industry. "These dairy farmers wanted cheaper electric power than that offered by local power companies, hence they organized ‘8 co-operative REA and in 1947 applied for a power dam, ‘which, when built, would clip off the lower reaches of a fifty-mile stretch in process of restoration as canoe-water ‘There was a sharp and bitter political fight. The Legisla- ture, sensitive to farmer-pressure but oblivious of wilderness values, not only approved the REA dam, but deprived the Conservation Commission of any future voice in the disposition of power sites. Tt thus seems likely that the remaining canoe-water on the Flambeau, as well as every other stretch of wild river in the state, will ultimately be hhamessed for power. Pethaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters. tue] Ilinois and Towa Mlinois Bus Ride ‘A farmer and his son are out in the yard, pulling a crosscut saw through the innards of an ancient cottonwood. ‘The treo is so large and so old that only a foot of blade is left to pull on. Time was when that tree was a buoy in the prairie sea, George Rogers Clark may have camped under it; buffalo ‘ay have nooned in its shede, switching flies. Every spring it roosted fluttering pigeons. It is the best historical Hbrary short of the State College, but once a year it sheds cotton on the farmer's window screens. Of these two facts, only the second is important. ‘The State College tells farmers that Chinese elms do not clog sereens, and hence are preferable to cottonwoods. Tt likewise pontiicates on cherry preserves, Bang’s disease, hybrid com, and beautifying the farm home. The only thing it does not know about farms is where they came from. Its job is to make Mlinois safe for soybeans. Tam sitting in a 60-mile-an-hour bus sailing over a high- ‘way originally lad out for horse and buggy. The ribbon of conorete has been widened and widened until the field fences threaten to topple into the road eats. In the narrow thread of sod between the shaved banks and the toppling fences grow the relics of what once was Mints: the prairie. 'No one in the bus sees these relics, A worried farmer, his tying it, and only one packer capable of the almost super- Boman of tlaning uch ad, But the paso fled to bring contentment; the lady decamped; and when the story was told me, the ranch cabin was already a ruin of ‘Ke there was Tilo Cenga? 9 marty meadow walled in by pines, under which stood, in my day, a small log cabin used by any passer-by as an overnight eamp. Te ‘was the unwritten law for the owner of such real estate to eave flour, lard, and beans, and for the passer-by to re- plenish such stock as he could. But one Iuckless traveler, ‘rapped there for a week by storms, had found only beans. This breach of hospitality was sufficiently notable to be inded down to history asa place name. "Fil ve war Pode Tach a ovo tage when read from a map, but something quite different when ‘you arrived there at the end of a hard ride, It lay tucked auvay on the far side of a high peak, as any proper paradise should. Through its verdant meadows meandered a singing trout stream, A horse left for a month on this meadow waxed 0 fat that rain-water gathered in a pool on his back. After sy fist visit to Paradise Ranch I remarked to myself: what cbse could you call it? Despite several opportunities to do so, I have never returned. to the Whito Mountain T prefer nt to see what tort roads, sawmills, and logging railroads have done for it, or to it. T hear young people, not yet born when T first rode cout ‘on top’ exclaim about it as @ wonderful place, To this, with an unspoken mental reservation, I agree. [128] Thinking Like a Mountain A deep chesty bavl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of eon- tempt for all the adversities of the world, Every living thing (and pechaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that cal. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight seufles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to tho hunter a challenge of fang against bullet, Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived Iong enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf Those unable to decipher the hidden meaning know nevertheless that it is there, for it is flt in all wolf country, and distinguishes that country from all other land, Tt tingles in the spine of all who hear wolves by night, or who sean their tracks by day. Even without sight or sound of wolf, it 4s implicit in a hundred small events: the midnight whinny of a pack horse, the rattle of rolling rocks, the bound of a flecing deer, the way shadows lie under the spruces. Only the ineducable tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of wolves, or the fact that mountains have a secret opinion about them, My own conviction on this score dates from the day 1 saw a wolf die, We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her (129)‘breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a weleoming mélée of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was Iiterally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock. Tn those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup.was drag- sing a leg into impassable slide-rocks. ‘We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fleree green ‘ire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes~ something known only to her and to the mountain, T was young then, and full of triggeritch; T thought that because Fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hnunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fie die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a Since then I have lived to see state after state extipate its wolves, I have watched the face of many a newly wollless ‘mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with « ‘maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetudo, and then to death. Ihave seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlchom. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all (1801other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped- for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers. now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of ts wae so doe a mountain Ive ls olf of deer, And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or thre years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades, : So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of ‘wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf job of trimming the herd to ft the range. He has not learned to think lke a mountain, Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers ‘washing the future into the [asey We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and ullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollar, but it all comes to the samo thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: Tn wildness is the salvation of the world, Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the how! of the wolf, log known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men. Escudilla Life in Arizona was bounded under foot by grama grass, overhead by sky, and on the horizon by Escudilla ‘To the north of the mountain you rode on honey-colored phins. Look up anywhere, any time, and you saw Eseudilla, To the east you rode over a confusion of wooded mesas. Each hollow seemed its own small world, soaked in sun, fragrant with juniper, and cozy with the chatter of pition jays. But top out ona ridge and you at once became a speck {In an immensity. On its edge hung Escudilla. To the south lay the tangled canyons of Blue River, full of whitetais, wild turkeys, and wilder cattle. When you tissed a saucy buck waving his goodbye over the skyline, and looked down your sights to wonder why, you looked at «far blue mountain: Escudila, To the wes billowed the outliers of the Apache National Forest. We cruised timber there, converting the tall pines, forty by forty, into notebook figures representing hypo. 1198thotical lumber piles. Panting up a canyon, the cruiser felt 1 curious incongruity between the remoteness of his note- book symbols and the immediacy of sweaty fingers, locust thoms, deerfly bites, and scolding squirrels. But on the nest ridge a cold wind, roaring across a green sea of pines, blew his doubts away. On the far shore hung Eseudilla, ‘The mountain bounded not only our work and our play, but even our attempts to get a good dinner. On winter eve- nings we often tried to ambush a mallard on the river fats. "The wary flocks circled the rosy west, the stecl-blue north, and then disappeared into the inky black of Escudilla. If they reappeared on set wings, we had a fat drake for the Dutch oven. If they failed to reappear, it was bacon and Deans again. “There was, ia fac, only one place from which you did not see Esendilla on the skyline: that was the top of Escudilla itself. Up there you could not see the mountain, but you could feel it. The reason was the big bear. (Ola Bigfoot was a robber-baron, and Escudilla was his castle. Each spring, when the warm winds had softened the shadows on the snow, the old grizaly crawled out of his hibernation den in the rock slides and, descending the moun- tain, bashed in the head of a cow. Eating his fill, he climbed back to his crags, and there summered peaceably on mar- mots, conies, berries, and roots T once saw one of his kills, The cow’s skull and neck were pulp, as if she had collided head-on with a fast freight, ‘No one ever saw the old bear, but in the muddy springs about the base of the clifls you saw his incredible tracks. Seeing them made the most hard-bitten cowboys aware of ‘bear. Wherever they rode they saw the mountain, and when they saw the mountain they thought of bear. Campfire tay conversation ran to beef, bales, and bear, Bigfoot cl , bailes, : claimed for his own oulyacow a year, and afew square miles of use less rocks, but his personality pervaded the county. ‘Those were the days when progress fist came to the cow country. Progress bad various emis, 1e was the frst transcontinental automobilist. The eo Boys underioo this beaker of ond; he talked the sume brow bravado s any breaker of bronchi ey did not understand, but they listened to and lo atthe prety lady in Hack vat wo cane agen them, in a Boston accent, about woman suffrage. They marveled, to, at the telephone engineer who strung yrs on the junipers and brought instantaneous mesags from tov, An old man asked whet wire cou! hima side of con. fe Te One spring, progress sent still another emissary, a gov ment trapper, a srt of St. George ta overs, Sckng dragons to slay at government expense, Were thers, he ashe any dstucv anil ane of lying? Ys, here ‘The trapper packed his mule and headed for Escudilla it. month he was brck, his mule staggering under a wy hide. There was only one barn ia town big enough to dy it on. He had tried traps, poisoa, and all his usual wiles tono avail. Then he had erected a set-gun in a defile through which only the bear could pass, and waited. The last grizzly aed Ge the string and shot himself, was June, The pelt was foul, patchy, and , patchy, and worthless. Tt seemed to us rather an insult to de say the last grizaly the chance to leave a good pela tera ois ace, Al he left was a skull in the National Museum, and a quarrel among selentists over the Latin name of the skull. [357‘Te was only after we pondered on these began to wonder who wrote the rules for progress. i basaltic hulk Since the beginning, tine had gnawed at the basalt of Bseaila: wasting, walling, and buldiog. Time built three things on the old mountain, a venerable aspect, a com munity of minor animals and plants, and grizaly. wermment trapper who took the grizzly knew he Pesce ne to oy en toppled the spire off an edifice a-building sine the morning stars sang together. ; "The Daren chit who seat the trapper was a bilgi versed in the architecture of evolution, but he did not know ‘hat spires might be as important as cows. He did not fore- see that within two decades the cow country would become 1238) tourist country, and as such have greater need of bears than of beefsteaks. ‘The Congressmen who voted money to clear the ranges of Dears were the sons of pioneers. They acclaimed the superior virtues of the frontiersman, but they strove with might and ‘main to make an end of the frontier. We forest oficers, who acquiesced in the extinguishment of the bear, knew a local rancher who had plowed up a Aagger engraved with the name of one of Coronado's cap- tains. We spoke harshly of the Spaniards who, in their zeal for gold and converts, had needlessly extinguished the native Indians. Tt did not oceur tous that we, too, were the eaptains ‘of an invasion too sure of its own righteousness. Escudila still hangs on the horizon, but when you see it you no longer think of bear. It’s only a mountain now. Chihuahua and Sonora Cuncamaja ‘The physics of beauty is one department of natural science still in the Dark Ages. Not even the manipulators of bent space have tried to solve its equations. Everybody knows, for example, that the autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a ruffed grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a milk lionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet sub- tract the grouse and the whole thing is dead. An enormous amount of some kind of motive power has been lost. Lis]